@Zinhead, I don’t think you added the numbers up correctly.
Across all UIUC CS programs + CompE bachelors, I get the following numbers for IL residents:
2005: 928
2010: 812
2015: 1056
You said “It is a public university that is supposed to serve state residents.”
But public universities have to be funded at the same level, or else you can’t expect them to serve state residents at the same level.
So I don’t know about across all publics for IL as a whole, but for U of I in particular, state funding went down from $292M in 2003 to $243M in 2013: http://www.senate.illinois.edu/130429budget.pdf
Finally, on your link, page 34 shows that TUITION revenue per student has gone up 66% from 2009->2014, NOT state funding.
@OldFashioned1, yep, this is all due to a surge in Chinese students, but as they say, “this too will pass”.
China has some major problems coming up in the short-term as well as declining college-age cohorts (thank/blame the one-child policy). In a few decades, American colleges (publics, anyway) will be looking back at this time as the golden age when they got cash from Chinese studying abroad to offset cuts in state funding.
This is a problem of adequate public funding of public universities. Many states have reduced state support of their public universities to the level that they are almost privates in the way they receive revenue for their operational budgets. A few years back UVA seriously considered becoming a private university due to the slashing of state money to the schools.
@PurpleTitan - You are correct regarding the total Illinois residents. However, that does not change the ratios much; the CS/CE departments still primarily teach non-Illinois students.
The state’s higher education budget goes through several layers before it gets allocated to UIUC. It is clear that the state is spending much more on higher education than they did in 2008. Why isn’t UIUC reporting the money.
You are right. Page 36 has the total revenue figures.
@Zinhead, actually, those figures I gave are for the whole U of I system (including UIC and Springfield).
And those revenue figures on page 36 include tuition. It actually isn’t clear to me that IL is spending more money on U of I. How are you drawing that conclusion? In fact, the numbers indicate that IL is spending less on U of I. As you see from my link, state expenditures on U of I actually went down from 2003->2013. Given that, why don’t you expect the ratio of IL kids in CS/CompE to fall (IL numbers staying roughly constant while international numbers increase)?
Much of the problem with UIUC is that is much less a part of state residents’ identity than other B1G schools. That hurts funding. UIUC’s nearly annual scandals do not help credibility. Maybe Rauner will bring in Ken Starr? I hear he is available. Lol My problem with what UIUC is doing is that they sell off the best seats. I would require international seats to be pro data across schools not only CS and business. Furthermore, I would not admit more males than females from a country that commits genocide on a massive scale against female babies.
I have also heard that cheating is rampant in graduate schools, especially among internationals, who are then rewarded with higher grades. They then point to the higher grades as proof that internationals are well qualified, when it is actually evidence of cheating.
The cheating needs to stop. It is not that difficult to catch if they make an effort. Beginning of term intake exams can be compared to standardized test scores and essays. Require photo ID for testing, and video tape the testing. A few more in-class tests, group presentations, and pop quizzes would help. Also you have to audit the TAs work for consistency and bias, because the easiest way to improve grades is to co-opt the TA who is doing the grading.
It also bothers me that many of the people who are not too bothered by this scandal would be apoplectic if this were an organized effort to cheat on behalf of AA students or Mexican students.
@PurpleTitan - The table on page 10 is titled UIUC Budget by Fund, and the bottom of the graph states The first three funds are centrally allocated. Including other funds in analysis is misleading. If the figures include the entire system, why wouldn’t it state that in the presentation?
As for the state funding of higher education, page 37 of the document linked earlier states:
The fact is that Illinois is spending more on higher education on an absolute and per student basis than it ever has before. During this time period, the number of students in the state university system declined from 391,386 to 326,329 between 2008 and 2014. The money is there.
As you said earlier, interest in CS/CE has expanded greatly in the past few years. A responsible college administration would add more slots to accommodate demand instead of bringing in foreign nationals. When in-state kids with a 34 and 35 ACT score get rejected, it is a clear sign that the department is not big enough.
@Zinhead, sorry, you’re right, those costs are for UIUC.
And money going to pensions doesn’t mean money going to the university for operation.
Basically, it looks like the IL was borrowing against the future (by severely underfunding pension obligations) until 2007. So you can argue that in-state students have unreasonably suffered since 2007, but they also unreasonably gained before 2007 (not funding pension costs meant that UIUC got higher-quality faculty than they were actually paying out for). Now that the state has to pay that earlier debt, there is less money for current students, hence UIUC’s need to bring in full-pay internationals.
If “educators” really cared, all that they would have to do is require an English/math test onsite on Day 1. Pass (validate your TOEFL, SAT/ACT score) and you stay. Fail and we invalidate your educational visa and cancel the admission.
@PurpleTitan - One of UIUC’s problems is that money earmarked for higher education is terribly mis-directed. If you look at the entire public education system in Illinois, overall enrollment is cratering.
The state should seriously consider closing one or more of the colleges mentioned in the above article, or schools like Chicago State, and rethink the higher education system. We have a system that was designed to educate more than 400,000 students per year, and it is currently serving around 325,000. There is too much capacity and not enough money to go around.
Native Non-native
Remedial WAC 101 WAC 107
Regular 1 ENG 101 ENG 107
Regular 2 ENG 102 ENG 108
Also, some international students are native English speakers, or close to it, since some non-US places are English speaking (e.g. England), or teach English in school from early on (e.g. many former UK colonies).
Given that China itself is extremely underprovisioned with space in its universities, the number of university graduates in China will not be especially affected (even though the smaller “one child” cohorts bring up other problems like support for aging parents and grandparents), since the number is based on the space available in the universities. Only about 6% of China’s >25 population has bachelor’s degrees, due to such capacity limitations. The shortage of university capacity in China does push some students with wealthy parents to look at university education outside of China.
Looks like the issue is that none of the other IL state schools is considered anywhere near as “desirable” as UIUC. So UIUC is super-impacted because everyone wants to go there but it (and many of its departments) are undersized relative to demand, but the other IL state schools are begging for students. Of course, if the other IL state schools have to cut programs due to falling enrollment and tuition, that reduces their desirability even more, creating a vicious cycle.
Perhaps states like AZ and IA avoided this problem by having relatively large state flagships and second flagships relative to their populations, so that most college-bound students in those states have the option of attending the flagship or second flagship.
@PurpleTitan@Much2learn@zinhead The logic that the Illinois students “unreasonably gained” because the state underfunded the pensions is not a very accurate, or useful, representation of the situation. The cost of the pension continues to rest with the state (and therefore taxpayers) whether it is funded today or in 2100.
It is a mistake to try to simply quantify college education using only annual revenue/expense numbers. College do not get “made” in September and “used up” in May. It’s a part of the picture, but a very skewed way to look at it.
Legacy and investment costs have been and will continue to be born by the state taxpayers to a certain extent for almost all state universities. OOS and international tuition are one-offs for a max of 4 (or maybe 6 in worst case scenarios). There is no investment or legacy obligation in those payments.
So the idea that in state students “unreasonably gained” is perverse. Perhaps state taxpayers “unreasonably pushed legacy costs into the future” and I don’t know how Illinois funds their U pension obligations, but in CA for instance, the legislature just wrote a separate check to start to top up underfunded pensions. It is not an OOS or international tuition funded check. It is a tax payer funded check.
The problem in Ill sounds very familiar. Top state schools are selling their best seats to OOS and international students for quick cash flow. It happened in CA - and included a change in funding structure to reward the campuses that do it - and of course, with reward came increased OOS and international enrollment.
it is a false dichotomy that there are only two choices: Enroll more international students in the most popular degrees or not have enough money. Systems the size of most big state university systems have lots of places to adjust finances. Increasing OOS and international money is the easy way, of course, as those student arrive with cash in hand. But it not the only option and a discussion of the issue does not need to rely on that binary.
@ucbalumnus "So UIUC is super-impacted because everyone wants to go there but it (and many of its departments) are undersized relative to demand, but the other IL state schools are begging for students. Of course, if the other IL state schools have to cut programs due to falling enrollment and tuition, that reduces their desirability even more, creating a vicious cycle.
Perhaps states like AZ and IA avoided this problem by having relatively large state flagships and second flagships relative to their populations, so that most college-bound students in those states have the option of attending the flagship or second flagship."
I wouldn’t say everyone in-state wants to go to UIUC. Net outflow of students is higher in IL than almost any other state, even with NU and U of C. I would say that students who want in-state public tuition and a school that has a decent reputation, they have no other choice than UIUC. I don’t see why they don’t just add capacity to impacted programs.
Also, I agree that they would be wise to close a few public schools, and invest in a second state flagship. Less capacity is needed, but they need a school that students have some reason to want to attend. That works reasonably well in Michigan, for example. If U of M wants to reject 35 ACT scores, MSU will be very happy to sweep them up, and even Western Michigan, Central Michigan, Grand Valley, and Oakland U are popular with residents.
I would also suggest that the whole concept of in-state tuition and funding is out dated. It was created for a good reason before there were cars, but now seems to create too many us vs. them situation that are inefficient. There has to be a better way. In the mean time, the top private U’s are thriving without public funding, and most are doing it without major sports programs either.
Why is it that the top publics continue to struggle? Why don’t the best ones go private and do what private schools do? Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, and UCLA could all transition to private over 10 - 15 years. States could still support residents attending college by buying allocations of seats through a competitive bid process. That would further encourage schools to run efficiently and offer majors that students want.
Probably because changes in capacity (for either departments or schools overall) generally happens more slowly than changes in student demand (and can be budget constrained). Also, http://dgs.illinois.edu/declaring-your-major indicates that most majors at UIUC are impacted and have admission requirements greater than staying in good academic standing and passing the prerequisites (2.0 GPA / C grades), so it appears that most departments at UIUC are undersized. Increasing the capacity of that many departments may also require other things besides faculty and staff (e.g. buildings).
Of course, there would be political resistance from the campus to be closed, even if the faculty and staff were offered jobs at UIUC to increase capacity there to relieve impaction.
Of course, convincing prospective students and parents that a non-UIUC IL public is now a second flagship may be a harder task.